Yeah. I’ve heard this too. However, these complaints are almost always about grading and rarely about teaching and learning. Teachers want clear guidelines in order to “defend” a mark, while students want them in order to “get” one in the most efficient way possible – narrow, focused performance to hit the “A” spot. Perhaps fuzzy guidelines help them do “better” because they require students to respond to more generally contextualized tasks.

You’re right, that students put a lot of effort into learning to “read” their teachers and this reading guides their performance. Four weeks is probably not enough time for this.

One thing that could be done if you are using rubrics is to include peer-review as one stage and run students through a normalizing process as part of this activity. Once this is done, it would be possible to invite criticism of the rubric and allow students to develop it further in ways that they believe are important. This may help students form a clearer view of expectations more rapidly than straightforward experience of the class does.